Something He Wasn't
by Malvolia
Summary: In his constant struggle to be somebody, the man called Sylar continually runs up against what he is not...and one thing he may be, after all. A series of oneshots about such moments of collision. [Spoilers through Kindness of Strangers.]
1. Special

In seventh grade, everything started to make sense.

School was much easier that year than it had been for Gabriel in any of the tortuous years in the past. He didn't spend long hours curled up in his living room with a history textbook, trying to remember the connections between obscure monarchs that helped or hindered centuries-old wars. He didn't erase and re-write grammar diagrams twenty times. He didn't wrack his brains for the right equation in beginning algebra. His stomach didn't even sink when he saw the rope hanging in the gym.

Because obviously intermarriage between royal families made sense from a political perspective, and obviously sentences had specific structures, and obviously _x _could not be confused with _y_, and obviously all the rope required was just the right combination of movements.

When Gabriel's first report card of the year arrived, his father was so pleased that he tacked it up on the wall over his workbench.

"See?" said his mother. "You _can_ do well in school if you keep trying like this."

His father coughed and rubbed his glasses on a corner of his shirt.

The report card had a note from his algebra teacher which read "a great grasp of the practical, but a limited imagination," and the next morning Gabriel looked at his teacher and felt that she was small, afraid of how much this child knew that she hadn't yet taught him. What he felt must be true—hadn't she said his imagination was limited? Besides, he didn't see how imagination would be of much help in algebra. You knew how to work the problems or you didn't. There was a right way to do them, and a wrong way. Simple brainpower.

Gabriel's mother started talking about the right classes, and the right colleges, and the right careers. He could be a lawyer, a doctor, a physicist, a politician. He could make a difference. He could be somebody, the first somebody in a family of nobodies.

His father worked nine to five in what he called a "cubicle farm" and fixed watches in the evenings for the extra money. Since he was a very small boy, Gabriel had always loved to draw up a chair next to his father's workbench and observe him at work, taking old worn-down watches apart, cleaning the parts, putting them back together so they ran properly once more.

"Good as new," his father would sigh when he finished, wiping his hands on a piece of clean cloth. Or, if it had been a particularly good night, "Better than the maker intended."

In seventh grade, Gabriel started helping his father with the watches. He had time in the evenings, now that homework was so much easier, and he enjoyed the peaceful rhythm of the work, sitting there beside his father in companionable silence and making broken things right. Sometimes customers would bring in clocks, too, which required similar yet different skills to those needed for working on watches. Gabriel soon had both skill sets at his disposal.

"Still at that?" his mother would sniff when she came home, smelling of bleach from her job cleaning the offices of important people. "Careful," she'd warn his father. "You're gonna turn him into a watch repairman."

"What's wrong with repairing timepieces?" Gabriel asked once, turning from the workbench where he and his father were working on restoring a clock for their own apartment.

His mother came over to him and placed her hands firmly on his face. His eyes watered from the bleach smell.

"You can do better," she said. "One of these days you'll shake the dust of this neighborhood off your feet and travel the world. One of these days," she said, pulling him into a quick hug, "you're gonna do something great. I can feel it."

In seventh grade, he saw that his mother loved him for something he wasn't yet, something he might never be.

Special.


	2. Satisfied

The last words his father ever said to him were "Did you remember to grease the winding stem?"

Gabriel had replied, "Of course."

His father had turned to him, half-smiling, and maybe he was going to say, "That's my boy"—he might have said it, given another second—but then his face had contorted suddenly and he had become a thing Gabriel couldn't fix.

He spent the next day—his sixteenth birthday, as it happened—at the workbench, repairing the small stack of watches left by his father's last customers. His mother railed at him for not caring that his father had died, but he knew that her anger was directed at herself for not particularly caring that her husband had lived until after it was too late. She didn't remember it was Gabriel's birthday, and he didn't remind her. His life had been tainted by death, and the fact that it happened so close to the anniversary of his birth was too uncomfortable to dwell on. It tainted _him_, too, somehow, as though he couldn't separate himself from death.

That stack of watches was meant to be the last, a fulfillment of his father's final obligations, but he ended up taking over the business by default. The customers whose watches he had repaired told other customers, who told other customers, and the watches kept coming, so he kept fixing them. It helped with the tight financial situation he and his mother found himself in after his father's death. Besides, with his entire life in a state of disarray, it helped to feel there were things he could fix.

"It's nice that your hobby brings in some money," his mother would say when he handed her the checks from his clients. Then, almost every time, she would look at the checks and add, "Even if it isn't much."

Gabriel went to college for about a year and a half before he dropped out. He had tried courses in just about every discipline and hadn't found a single one of them challenging. His grades had been good. In fact, a professor hinting that they were perhaps a little too good had been the last straw. He refused to put up with anyone else in his life who would tell him his best somehow wasn't enough.

With college behind him, he didn't know what to do. He hadn't known what he wanted to do while he was in college, either. Nothing interested him as much as what he was already doing, except maybe repairing engines. Or plumbing. And he knew better than to suggest either of those things to his mother as a potential vocation.

He was earning good money as a watchmaker by now, though his mother didn't think so. She was surprised when he moved into his own apartment. She came so close to accusing him of selling drugs that he felt forced to show her the business receipts—he had long since fallen out of the habit of showing her everything.

"I guess that'll keep a roof over your head," she sniffed, "until you figure out what you really want to do with your life. And you can always come back home."

Slowly, but not as slowly as his mother had expected, the Gray watchmaking business became what it had been before Gabriel was born, before his mother made his father give it up for the stability of office work. He never placed an ad, never passed out flyers, never asked for referrals. The closest he came to soliciting business was when he would tell a fellow traveler on the subway that her watch was two minutes slow, or point out to a grocery store manager that his clock had stopped. But that wasn't really to drum up business. He just thought it was an embarrassment to be associated with anything that wasn't working, and he thought people ought to be saved from that.

Advertise or not, the business grew, until he had so much work he could have afforded to hire an assistant. Instead, he kept longer hours. He preferred to work alone.

They called him a watchmaker, but he never really _made_ watches. He only repaired the work of others, those pieces that had gone wrong through flaws in design or in use. He never created. He never even improved. Always copying, never original.

Some nights he lay awake for hours, wondering what to do about the gnawing sense of unease that was consuming him. Wondering what his life would look like if he had a purpose. Wondering if there was somebody, somewhere, who could tell him why he was here.

Wondering what it would be like to be satisfied.


	3. Nice

Sylar, he realized, wasn't a very nice person.

Perhaps that was obvious to others. Perhaps it was only because he had been focusing so hard on his mission, on recycling the powers of the unworthy with whom he came into contact, that he had missed it.

The mission wasn't what was bothering him. People who didn't have the capacity or desire to utilize their powers were broken, like a senior citizen with terminal cancer or a fetus that carried the Down syndrome gene, and he was confident that he was right to save them from the misery of living incomplete lives.

He supposed he could anesthetize them before he started slicing their skulls open. That might be nicer. But he wasn't losing any sleep over it.

Barring his parents, he couldn't remember the last time he had been nice to anyone.

True, the kids at school had tormented him, first for being an idiot and then for being a teachers' pet.

True, none of the teachers had ever really trusted him, and many had accused him of cheating.

True, his old customers had only appreciated the watchmaking service he provided, not the watchmaker himself.

True, even being around his own mother had become so oppressive that until very recently he hadn't spoken to her in months, months stretching back to when he was still Gabriel Gray.

True, Chandra Suresh had only been using him to defend his own thesis.

True, the hoards of normal New Yorkers had no idea who was walking in their midst, no idea that he was anything more than a scruffy vagrant, no idea that he was better than they were, no idea that he could crush them in an instant if they so much as looked at him wrong…

…which was the sort of not nice thought that he was trying to analyze.

Normal people were insignificant, but at least they were innocent. In a way. At least innocent of the crime of burying their gifts.

He thought of his father with a twinge of something between regret and anger. His father, who wanted to be a watchmaker, who was _good_ at it, and who chose to bow to his wife's urging and give up the only thing that fulfilled him.

Sylar himself was still a watchmaker at heart. He killed like a watchmaker, with precision, purpose, economy. How to reconcile this fact with the vision of the impending blast? Why would he kill innocent people?

He wouldn't. He knew he wouldn't. But as his father had proven, normal people could be guilty, too.

Maybe they were all guilty, guilty of denying their potential, guilty of willful blindness as the world changed around them, guilty of feeling guilt for acting on their mission, their mission….

Guilty of scrawling one more "Forgive me, Father" on the wall before washing his hands for the night.

What if destroying the city were what it took to save them all from themselves? What if an explosion could be absolution?

He had meant to ask his mother all this. Right up until the scissors had pierced her heart.

Gabriel Gray would have been devastated. Sylar….

Well, Sylar was not a very nice person.


	4. Angel

He remembered running into the jungle, numb with powerlessness. He remembered collapsing, remembered vaguely thinking that he should roll off the road, remembered not caring whether he lived or died. After that, he couldn't remember anything—how long he had been there, how many times he had briefly gained and then swiftly lost consciousness—until the memory of feeling hands turning him, and of opening his eyes into the blazing sun and the darkness of her face.

Funny thing was, at first glance he thought _she_ was the otherworldly being.

When she asked—hinted, rather—for his name, he found himself saying "It's Gabriel." The syllables felt strange on his tongue, and he didn't know why they had come so easily. He glanced down at his shattered watch. "Gabriel Gray."

"Gabriel," she repeated, as if fixing it in her memory, and then she gasped. "Like the angel!"

If he had learned his catechism correctly, that other Gabriel foretold and celebrated the power of another, never wanting to be other than a herald.

He had to look away as he answered in the affirmative: "Just like the angel." Her face was too open, her smile too trusting, too vulnerable. No one had ever smiled at him like that. He stared at the watch for long moments, his feeling of powerlessness amplified by feeling the sway of someone else's power.

He was desperate for the return of his gifts. Even just the one gift, the ability to recognize how things worked. He could start over, rebuild. He could find out what it was that made her smile so contagious.

She didn't know who he was, but that didn't seem to bother her. She flipped through the book by his side, stopping now and then to point something out, seemingly oblivious to the fact that he couldn't read Spanish. As she voiced her thoughts on what she was reading ("Flying…can you imagine? Flying? Incredible…"), he stared at her fiercely, trying to determine just what sort of power she had.

Because she had to be special, like him. No one would be that intrigued by Suresh's research if it didn't pertain to them personally. Certainly the man traveling with her, Alejandro, had seemed a bit too protective of the book for it to be a simple matter of curiosity.

Alejandro spoke only to her, only in Spanish. When she answered, her face lit up with the same intensity with which she favored a complete stranger. Albeit a stranger she compared to an angel.

He felt the usual pang of frustration at being treated the same as everyone else, but then she turned her smile on him again and Alejandro might just as well not have existed.

It was a fascinating power. He only wished he knew how it worked. He practiced smiling back at her—he felt as if those muscles were out of practice, and he would need them later when he got his powers back and was able to acquire hers. He practiced small talk and wondered why she couldn't hear how fake it sounded.

Once, he caught himself in the middle of telling her about his father's clock—how his mother would always let it run down, and he would always repair it.

"Why?" she asked.

He answered without hesitation, "Because my father made it, and he loved it. That made it worth fixing."

She sighed happily and smiled again. "I'm glad we found you."

His lips pulled up naturally into that expression that was so unnatural for him. "Me, too."

Surely he hadn't meant to tell her that story, but she had drawn it out of him somehow, from a place inside that he tried to ignore. He thought of Eden McCain and swore not to let the opportunity pass him twice.

When Derek told him she was a murderer, his mental gears began whirring at high speed.

"Well, golly," he said, and when Derek didn't even look at him oddly for saying it he hated the man for being so stupid on top of so inconsequential. "They seem so…." He looked back towards the car and caught Maya's eye. She burst into that radiant smile and he forgot how he was going to finish his sentence.

Again, Derek didn't notice. He didn't notice when Sylar walked up behind him, either—or if he noticed, he didn't turn. Trusting fool. So paranoid to discover he'd been riding with murderers for two days and he didn't even turn.

He slipped back into the car ready to play the hero, but he wasn't ready for her reaction, her sharp panic, her raw, overwhelming _power_.

He was darkness, darkness from the inside out, darkness swallowing and devouring and it was entirely possible that her smile was not advanced evolution but something else entirely.

"What are you doing to me?" he gasped, and his heart was black, and the air was black, and out of the corner of his fading vision he saw Alejandro grasp her hands, and he was muttering to her urgently, and she was breathing slower, and as Sylar saw her oil-black tears become clear he realized he was breathing again as well.

Such complementary abilities…such reliance on her side and protectiveness on his…. Maya and Alejandro, Sylar realized in a rush, were nothing more nor less than siblings.

He looked at Alejandro and felt the darkness still present in his heart. As he turned the key in the ignition, another catechism association suddenly presented itself: Lucifer, the heavenly being who fell through overreaching, drove a wedge between the first pair of people who ever lived, and then lived himself to see them both die.

Just like _an_ angel, anyway.


End file.
